Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Tuesday March 08, 2011 @04:32PM
from the who-needs-landlines dept.

From the article "Google Voice users learned late Monday that the service now has a way of making purely Internet-based phone calls. Making a SIP call with a 'sip:' prefix, the Google Voice phone number and @sip.voice.google.com skips the conventional phone network entirely, saving users cellphone minutes. Disruptive Telephony tested it and found that a call worked 'great.'"

Because they provide useful services to most of us, and unless you're storing gigabytes of child porn they probably don't have anything interesting to say about you anyway.

I guess your definition of "probably" and my definition of "probably" are a bit different... What's to stop them from cataloging a massive amount of data (which by all accounts they already are) and then suffering a massive security breach that results in that data falling into the hands of people who "probably" DO have interesting things to say about anyone and everyone they disagree with.

The fact that they are ambivalent to anything but the most egregious offenses is some temporary comfort, but once reco

They came out with their hands clean when they discovered the wifi logging / google street view cars breach within a couple of weeks, and were willing to work with authorities and pay any fines without contesting them. Every time it's not readily transparent that Google is accessing your location on Android phones (cell tower-Based GPS, Latitude), you are notified immediately. You can also access what they have about you online in your dashboard.

SRTP doesn't provide end-to-end encryption - only as far as the SIP server, Google would still be able to decrypt the data.It's also useless unless the SIP packets are encrypted with TLS, as the encryption key is sent through the SIP signalling in plaintext.

If they support ZRTP, that would provide end-to-end encryption.

But since it's going out to the PSTN, they *are* the other end, so that they can decrypt the voice and sent it over the PSTN. There's no way to avoid that.

But there are thousands of languages that they don't translate. There are hundreds if not thousands of languages that are not documented either. So, all you have to do is make friends with some aging Native Americans and learn their language! Some native languages of (North and South) America only have a handful of speakers left and are sparsely documented or undocumented and dying out as national languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese) displace them. There are also lots of undocumented languages in remote

With the Google Talk Voice and Video plugin, you have been able to make free internet calls for a long time now, and they will even remain free (in the US anyway) for the rest of the year at least. In fact, on the Google Voice page, it has the option of calling from gchat, and I do that now quite frequently as it's easier and better quality than my phone.

Google Talk is based on XMPP and the service supports jingle (audio/video) and federation (connecting to other XMPP servers). I have been able to do audio and video calls from my jabber.org account to Google Talk users for quite awhile. If there is also SIP support that is not a bad thing but it's not like audio calls between Google Talk users and users of other servers is something new.

You can make phone calls, to peoples' mobile phone, or home landline, using a data-only connection on your mobile phone running Google Voice. And they can call your Google Voice number from their home landline and it rings on your mobile phone thru the data connection. (Mobile phone without a minute plan).

The awesome thing about this is that I can use an ATA to make a phone call directly from my desk phone without having to use the web interface or having Google call me. Also, I can use the SIP support built into Android 2.3 to make calls via wifi.

I currently use callcentric.com as a SIP provider to do just this. It's not free, but at $2.95 a month for a dial-in number, and $0.02 a minute for outbound calls to the US, it's pretty darn close. Call quality is comparable to land line phone calls.

Is it just because SIP + Google Voice will presumably be free that people are getting so excited?

I use Callcentric as well, but I think the reason people are excited is because lots of people use Google Voice (for the follow-me services and voicemail-as-text, mostly), so the userbase is a lot larger than anything Callcentric is likely to have in the near future. And when you are talking about communications technology, "network effects" that depend on having a large number of users are very important.

But the upshot for people who already have a SIP provider like Callcentric handling their home phone i

I'm confused. The article makes it sound like this lets you call someone else's Google Voice number using any SIP client, but it doesn't help you make or receive calls if you have Google Voice?

Here is what I'm trying to do. I have an Android phone and Google Voice. I get poor cell phone reception at my house, so I would like to be able to use Wifi on my phone to make, and more importantly, receive calls.

So basically Google gTalk is just SIP with some features (not very surprising) and they had an open gateway. Now they closed it.

What is surprising is why people even care whether gTalk is accessible with SIP or not. SIP is freely available with tons of providers of hardware phones (eg. grandstream) as well as PBX software (eg. Asterisk) as well as termination/origination providers to/from PSTN networks (eg. les.net, callwithus.com, etc. etc. etc.)

My (faint) suspicion is some VoIP telespammers/tele fraudsters saw the Slashdot article/blog and immediately started abusing the feature...

As nice as 'free SIP access' to the POTS network through Google voice might sound, it's not sane.

Even less sane than having offering open SMTP relays, anyways; since the telephone network is so poorly equipped to deal with any type of abuse (other than it actually being a crime if the perp happens to live in a 'civilized' country, and happens to be traceable).

They bought out Gizmo5 a year and half ago, just about the time I was seriously looking at SIP for home use. One day it was there, the next.. nope. I saw this and figured that Google was finally tying Gizmo5 to gVoice. Well, crap. It doesn't seem to be so... at least not yet.

If you take an android device with google voice installed. Tell it use google voice for all calls. The get an Xlink device (http://www.myxlink.com/index.aspx [myxlink.com]). Peer the XLink to your android device via bluetooth. Now you have analog dial tone coming out of the XLink and you can put it into a PBX or regular analog phones.

Verizon and T-Mobile allow you to have a data-only plan on your smartphone, something like $50/mo. Not dirt cheap, mind you, but no sense in paying an extra $20 for voice that you're never going to use, right? Dunno about Sprint, though, and it's not an option o AT&T.

If you take an android device with google voice installed. Tell it use google voice for all calls. The get an Xlink device (http://www.myxlink.com/index.aspx [myxlink.com]). Peer the XLink to your android device via bluetooth. Now you have analog dial tone coming out of the XLink and you can put it into a PBX or regular analog phones.

Dude, the entire point is not needing to have a phone other than the google voice number.

I could just as easily get direct SIP trunking to my PBX. I like this because it merges my cell number and google voice into my existing PBX. No fuss, no settings to deal with. I come home, put my phone my desk, it automatically peers with the XLink, and now I can access its trunks from any phone on my PBX, and use my PBX to route calls in ways google voice does not support. This, for me, gets me the best of both worlds. Mobile when I am mobile, features when I am stationary.

Gizmo5 (acquired by Google) will be shutting down on April 3rd. So no more SIP from them. Does anyone know whether it will become possible to make calls to normal numbers by using a google account? Right now it is possible to make calls from within gmail by adding credit to one's account. What is not possible is to use SIP equipment (many good adsl routers and ATA devices have fxp ports and VoIP SIP functionality) to make these calls. So many of us that were using gizmo5 SIP are left in the cold. Any good gizmo5 alternatives anyone?

Try pbxes.com. They have an integration with gtalk so you can use gvoice as a trunk without a separate service. If you have an android phone, you can download sipdroid and it will give you the option to automatically set up a pbxes account linked to your gvoice account. You can then point other sip devices to your pbxes account as well. Works great for me.

I set up an account there using Sipdroid, the only issue is that when I call my GV number, my phone will ring like normal (due to my real cell number being set as a number to call in the GV settings) AND over SIP, so the phone is ringing 2 things at the same time. Weird.:)

I tried this (and was very excited to find it), but sipdroid seems to have trouble staying logged in to pbxes, so I only sometimes get incoming calls (or can make outgoing calls); and call quality is ok-to-poor (but it is free).

I use an Obi110 device to make and receive calls on my home phone using Google Voice. It was the best $50 I've spent on a VoIP solution. It will remain free until at least the end of the year while GV is still free. Before that I used a Linksys PAP2 connected to an Asterisk server to do the same thing.

Yes, I've been making real, 100% VOIP calls on my Android device over WiFi with my GV for a while. There's a whole project dedicated to it: http://code.google.com/p/google-voice-sipsorcery-dialplans/ [google.com]Personally, I use the IPKall + Sipsorcery method, but I hear signups at Sipsorcery are currently closed. I'm not sure what's available in the meantime.

I switched away from Gizmo5 when I noticed there was high latency on the line and a delay in ringing the IP phone.
You could try to use sipgate.com. They are a PSTN to SIP broker and provide a telephone number for free. You could forward your Google Voice to this number and calls route normally inbound.

After purchasing gizmo5, they destroyed my home phone service. I was not allowed to renew my call in number forcing me to use google voice to rout my incoming calls. At the same time, they took away my year subscription to modify my outgoing caller id with the purchase caller ID option, they refunded me by giving me $4 of call out minutes (dumb asses!). Every time I call out, the call appears to be coming from a number that has now been canceled for about a year, and cannot be modified. Now, about a week ag

Not sure about where you are, but some countries have telecoms regulators giving you the legal right to port your telephone service to another provider...I would never let myself depend on such a service without having an exit strategy, and being able to take your number and move it to a different provider at will is a pretty good one.

Phono is a simple jQuery plugin and JavaScript library that turns any web browser into a phone; capable of making phone calls and sending instant messages. You can even connect to SIP clients; all with a simple unified API.

By emailing me (a up-to-now satisfied Gizmo5 user) about discontinuation of the gizmo5 service less than a month from now, without having a viable SIP-compatible alternative already prepared, I've already made other arrangements that don't involve Google.

Now if Google Voice would only let me forward my google voice number to a SIP URI, then I would be in great shape.

I have been doing this with Gizmo for some time and it worked great, now that its disapearing. I could forward GV to Gizmo and then send Gizmo to a SIP URI that terminated in my hosted Asterisk server and from there I could do basically whatever I wanted.

I would also like the ability to forward my Google Voice number to an international number, which Google Voice doesn't offer even as a paid service.

While I'm complaining, It would also be great if I could purchase GV credit and send outbound traffic from my Asterisk or Kamailio to GV via SIP.